Long Island astronauts reflect on the influence of Apollo 11

The first landing of man on the moon in July 1969 inspired a generation of Americans, but perhaps no one more than those who became astronauts. 

A half dozen Long Islanders have flown into outer space. They are some of the lucky ones from among thousands of Americans who have tried.

Becoming an astronaut is extremely difficult. Each time NASA announced a new class, thousands of people applied, some years as many as 15,000, said Gary Morse, a long time NASA official who served as network director for the first 100 Space Shuttle missions. 

Of those applicants, perhaps a dozen or so would be selected for each astronaut class. And of those, only some  would end up in space.

Here, two of Long Island's astronauts reflect on Apollo 11 and their careers. 

Mike Massimino 

Mike Massimino was 6 years old and sitting in his living room in Franklin Square when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, filling the screen of his family's black and white TV.

Massimino was mesmerized.

“I remember going out in the front yard and looking up at the moon and saying, ‘Wow. There are people there,’” he said.

More than three decades later, he would look the other way, gazing down at Earth from outer space. He went up twice, in 2002 and 2009, as an astronaut on the Space Shuttle.

“I thought the astronauts were the coolest people around and I wanted to grow up to be just like them,” he said.

In those early days of space exploration, he was fixated. He dressed up like Armstrong, with the help of his mother turning the top of an elephant costume from the first-grade school play into a helmet. He played with a Snoopy astronaut toy and went to the Franklin Square Public Library to learn everything he could about the space program. 

He remembers Apollo 8 a few days before Christmas 1968, becoming the first manned spacecraft to reach the moon, orbiting it and photographing an Earthrise. Then came Apollo 9 in March 1969, and Apollo 10 that May — a “dress rehearsal” for the first lunar landing on July 21.

“I thought it was an amazing accomplishment,” he said. The astronauts “were my heroes.”

His dream faded, though, as the years passed. By around the age of 9 the reality of how hard it was to become an astronaut hit him. But he learned that his Little League Baseball coach was an engineer at Grumman, and he set his sights on that instead.

"Becoming an astronaut, it was just too far-fetched,” he said.

It wasn’t until his senior year at Columbia University, in 1984, when he saw the film “The Right Stuff” based on Tom Wolfe’s book of the same title, that the fire started burning again. Two years after landing a job as a systems engineer at IBM, Massimino quit to pursue graduate studies with the idea of launching a career in the space program.

He earned two master’s degrees and finally a Ph.D. at MIT. By 1996, NASA, where he had worked some summers during graduate school, selected him as an astronaut candidate. He was so surprised to be chosen, he said he later called them back to make sure it wasn't a prank. 

Finally, six years later, he made it into space. And again seven years after that. The trips involved 572 hours in outer space, including 30 hours spacewalking.

“It’s a lot of work and a lot of responsibility but it’s also the most extraordinary thing I think you can do,” he said.

Today, Massimino, 56, is a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University, his alma mater. Looking back, he says even though he was just a young boy at the time, he understood the impact of Apollo 11.

“I thought it was the most important thing that was ever going to happen in my lifetime and almost the most important thing that was ever going to happen in the world for the next 500 years,” he said.

“And I still think that.”

Mary Louise Cleave

At 16, Mary Louise Cleave was already in love with aviation. That same summer Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, Cleave would solo her first plane at summer camp. 

It was at that camp upstate that she remembers a group of campers packed in a rec room, hooting and hollering with excitement at Armstrong's historic first steps. 

But Cleave never gave a thought to following in those footsteps. Girls, and women didn’t do such things.

“All of the guys on the Apollo, they were all males with crew cuts,” she said. “My parents probably would have sent me to a psychologist if I had said, ‘I want to be an astronaut.’ It was bad enough I wanted to be a pilot.”

Instead, after graduating from Great Neck North High School and Colorado State University, she would apply to become an airline stewardess.

“That’s what women did when they wanted a job in aviation,” she said. “There were no other real jobs available.”

But even that didn’t work out: Cleave was only 5’2”. Stewardesses had to be 5’4”, so they could put passengers’ bags in the overhead bins.

In the end, it did not matter. The passage of the Title IX civil rights legislation in 1972 opened opportunities for girls and women, not just in sports, but in a range of fields. One of them was exploring outer space.

Cleave earned a master's degree and Ph.D. at Utah State University, and by 1980 was accepted into NASA’s astronaut program — two years after the pioneer Sally Ride entered.

Being selected "made me feel proud to be an American," she said. 

Cleave went on to fly into outer space twice aboard the Space Shuttle — in 1985 and 1989. She was the 10th woman to fly beyond the earth’s atmosphere, and even today only 40 American women have done it.

She is matter-of-fact about her accomplishments. Asked if she considers herself a groundbreaker, she said, “I was just having a good time."

Now 72 and living in Annapolis, Maryland, she does think she brought a different perspective to the space program than many of the men. Not just because she is a woman, but because she is a trained environmental engineer.

Many astronauts “looked down at the earth and they thought about how beautiful it was," she said. 

What she remembers seeing is this: deforestation in the Amazon, sediment coming out of the rivers and national parks that looked like "little jewels" because they were protected and not overgrazed.

"When I flew I was an environmental engineer so I looked down at the earth and I said, “Ew, man, our land-use policies stink,’ because you could see the impact we were making on the surface of the planet."
 

But the charms of space were not lost on her. Another "ah ha" moment came when she looked out at the galaxy for the first time and had to adapt her eyes to the vast darkness in order to navigate. 

Growing up on Long Island, she said, “you are living with light pollution. You really don’t get a good appreciation of the stars because there is so much light in that area. You get to look out a space ship with your eyes dark adapted and…there is so much stuff out there.”